how do these guys make money? I have a dropbox account but it is free...I guess they charge for higher capacity box, is that it for revenue? why can't Amazon offer the same? They have the largest cloud in the world...Kris

Dropbox is largely believed to be profitable, according to several media reports and the company spokesperson, although the company has never released the figures.

Yes, they make money from subscriptions for the storage space and personal data individuals want to store is rising.

Once Dropbox gets its act together to increase enterprise clients, it can grow revenues further.

Even though Dropbox announce its own plan to move into the business market, I suspect an additional security application such as the one offered by Intrinsic-ID would be helpful to attract more business and professional users...

thank you Junko...is this sutanaible revenue stream though?...storing your data in the cloud is not such a big deal...Google, Amazon, IBM, and few other companies can do that as well...Dropbiox might had been there first but I am not convinced they retain their first to market adavantge...Kris

We know that another much-hyped company, Box, a competitor of Dropbox, is not profitable. So whether dropbox is profitable remains to be seen.

Dropbox uses Amazon's s3, which makes its cost higher than rivals like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and DriveHQ. Dropbox's consumer users rarely pay for the service, without online ads revenue like Google has, Dropbox's consumer service is likely to lose quite a lot of money.

Now, Dropbox's business service should be extremely profitable, considering it charges business customers $180/user/year, which is 30 times more expensive than DriveHQ's more advanced Cloud IT service (at $6/user/year).

The question is how many businesses will be willing to pay Dropbox at this price, and how long they will pay.

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.